We study how political boundaries and fiscal competition interact with the labor and land markets to determine the economic structure and performance of metropolitan areas. Contrary to general belief, institutional fragmentation need not be welfare-decreasing, and commuting from the suburbs to...

We develop a model where the unemployed workers in the city can find a job either directly or through weak or strong ties. We show that, in denser areas, individuals choose to interact with more people and meet more random encounters (weak ties) than in sparsely populated areas. We also...

This study employs an analytic urban economics approach, assuming that Toyohashi City takes a linear shape and there are two districts where the vulnerabilities to the earthquake in the two districts are different. That is, Toyohashi City is divided into two districts, one is safe for the...

A recent literature has used a historical perspective to better understand fundamental questions of urban economics. However, a wide range of historical documents of exceptional quality remain underutilised: their use has been hampered by their original format or by the massive amount of...

Reproducing the socio-spatial structure of cities is one of the challenges facing the standard urban economics model of Alonso, Muth, Mills (AMM model). In a widely cited paper, Jan K. Brueckner, Jacques-François Thisse and Yves Zenou (1999) asked "Why is central Paris rich and downtown Detroit...

The city of Brussels has a unique position in Europe. It is not only the capital city of the European Union, it also the capital of federal state of Belgium, of its two different language communities and of the government of the Brussels region. Independent of this, the city itself is composed...

The paper proposes an econometric approach for quantifying jointly the geographical scope of commuting as well as the various forms of agglomeration economies originating from metropolitan centers. Adopting an urban economics perspective, and using land prices to measure their aggregate effects,...

Beckmann;s interaction model has each resident touching base in face-to-face activity with every other resident, per unit time, at the other's residence. We re-work his resulting "interaction city" with each resident "operating with" a Cobb-Douglas utility function. We then turn to a more...

Households in real cities are heterogeneous regarding their size and composition. An aspect usually neglected in urban models used to study economic and policy issues that arise in today's cities. We develop an urban general equilibrium model that takes a more complex household structure...

Households in real cities are heterogeneous regarding their size and composition. This implies that the household structure -i.e. the (average) household size, the composition, the relative share of different household types, and the number of households - differs across cities. This aspect is...